Is the notion of the 'soul' outdated?

Great Debates
21

—As far as I am aware (and please point me in the appropriate direction if I am wrong), there is not yet a complete model, based solely on genes and environment, which sufficiently explains every aspect of the human psyche and personality and thought.—

I’m not even sure what you mean by that. I thought the whole problem the “soul” was meant to address was not psychology (for which there are a fair number of plausible lines of explanation) but rather subjective experience: why we experience what we do.

—What I said was that it is arrogant to dismiss something as impossible, just because I/you/we can’t imagine how it is possible within the confines of “scientific paradigm”.—

My point is, though, what is there that you are claiming is being dismissed int he first place? It’s not like you are presenting an intelligible concept, and we’re finding that the concept simply doesn’t jibe, or doesn’t have support in what we currently know of reality. That’s not what’s happening at all. Instead, we have a pure appeal to ignorance: we can’t see yet how, or if ever, a certain phenomenon could arise knowing what we currently know… and thus this word (a “soul”), devoid of any actual underlying of characteristics, is our default answer for the phenomena of… well we’re not exactly sure what it is we need to explain either.

That is, the concept of the soul seems to RELY upon not being explicable, regardless of what “paradigm” is being used.

—I have only expressed my personal opinion that it might, due to what I perceive as gaps in the “physical” model (as I have called it).—

But WHAT is it that might exist?! That is the whole point: what is this thing “soul” that is the solution to the gaps in the physical model, and how does it, in any way, bridge those gaps? As far as I can see, there is no such concept, no such hypothesis of the bridge.

22

eris: no, I haven’t gone anywhere just yet. :slight_smile: But if I jumped into every GD thread which interested me, I’d completely exhaust myself.

Apos: your questions are entirely fair. While I am not appealing to “pure ignorance” to support my position, I acknowledge that I ought to have offered some sort of definition for “soul” in stating that position. I do have one and would very much like to present it to you, but I am finding it difficult to articulate these things at the moment. I should not have started down that road unless I was prepared to engage in the discussion, and I must admit that I am not.

So, perhaps I can return later, at another time or in another thread, and try to give your questions the thoughtful answers they deserve. Until then, I will withdraw my previous statements about the actual existence of “soul” and let stand only my remarks about the value of “soul” as a metaphor.

23

My $.02 on this:

There’s always going to be “dark matter,” which science won’t be able to measure and explain. The problem with discussion of sentience, the sense of subjectivity, and so on, is that it is very difficult to ask meaningful and testable questions about it. Our tools for answering these questions are only a little better suited than the introspection of philosophers (although some great efforts have been made… check out <I>DesCarte’s Error</I> and <I>Consciousness Explained</I>). Questions like this, that science is ill-equipped to answer, leave room for the mystical.

I for one don’t think that there’s any mysticism involved… I believe that the thing we call the soul is something the brain <I>does</I>, not anything that <I>is</I>. We can apply an edge of parsimony: if there is a survival advantage to any attribute that is human, then it may have developed through normal evolutionary processes, and is therefore biological. Since <debatable point>sentience is a survival advantage</debatable point>, there is no need for any miracle.

But I remain open minded. Parsimony is a only a heuristic. To leave you with a last thought: when I was a freshman biology major, my professor said that a very slight decrease in mass has been observed in humans at the exact moment of death. Mass<sub>alive</sub> - Mass<sub>dead</sub>, he was suggesting, could be the mass of the soul.

24

If artificial intelligence is whatever we haven’t made yet, then the soul is wherever we haven’t looked. :slight_smile:

I love spouting off littel quips like this. Look, I’ve got another!